Exact Difference between "Content-Provider" and "SQLite Database"

I have made many good apps with thousands of users using them which simply used SQLite methods. But that was a while ago and I had to manually write lots of code which now can easily be taken care of by ContentProvider. Back then I was not in favour of using Content Providers because it seemed to only add complexity in the code.

However for last couple of years, as Android has evolved, I have moved to ContentProvider as it saves time and allows you do to more. I now use it extensively. Once you have a Content Provider class written, your life becomes much easier. With ContentProvider I can much easily deal with Cursor Loaders, Loader Callbacks and Bulk Inserts for which I had to write everything manually in the past and still it didn't work as efficiently. Especially when updating the list view, which is now automatically updated thanks to just one notifychange() method. This means now I don't have to type my own listeners and manually updating the content in list views and adapters. Plus, I don't need to worry about opening and closing of databases or worry about memory leaks. That's all handled by the Content Provider. The only problem which once in a while I face is that that you cannot do some complex queries in ContentProviders. In this case you can still use raw queries and use the old fashioned manual interaction with sqlite.

If you have previously written your own DbAdapter, Helper and Observer, you can safely carry them on to your new apps without spending time to convert everything to ContentProvider. But based on my experience, I would highly recommend to move to ContentProvider. It'll take some time to get used to it, but once you have got experience with it, you'll stay with it.

UPDATE 2017 I have now switched to Realm, a much better way to use databases on any platform. Spend a few hours learning it, and save countless hours in your app development career.

What is the exact difference between "Content-Provider" and "SQLite Database"?

ContentProvider is a facade -- an API you can implement that exposes databases to other processes. It can be implemented in a way where the data is stored in a SQLite database, but it does not have to be.

Which is best to store data, when ?

That is impossible to answer in the abstract. Generally speaking, unless something is requiring you to use a ContentProvider, just use a database.

I found one major difference, as follows:

Storing your data in a database is one good way to persist your data, but there's a caveat in Android-databases created in Android are visible only to the application that created them. That is to say, a SQLite database created on Android by one application is usable only by that application, not by other applications.

So, if you need to share data between applications, you need to use the content provider model as recommended in Android. This article presents the basics of content providers and how you can implement one.

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